24

 

24 years of being married

I hadn't read Ulysses

though we were wed on a Bloomsday

I—a flower of the mountain—

his heart going like mad.

Children, really, looking back

but children are good at knowing

what they want;

it's the holding on that takes

an adult. 

Paul, 

and yes I said yes I will

Yes.

22 Light Years to You

I’m pleased to announce the publication of my third novel, 22 Light Years to You, which is now available as an ebook across these platforms: 

Amazon

Amazon UK

Apple

Barnes & Noble

Kobo

Smashwords

Synopsis:

Every life has an arrow of time. It starts at the beginning, and runs to the end. 

But not for Amy Gallagher. As an astrophysicist, Amy has a different conception of time. And now, with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, she is poised to reassemble the events of the past by studying light from the first known stars. In much the same way, 22 Light Years to You redshifts Amy’s own life, reversing the arrow of time from the year 2022 to the night she first met her husband, Greg, in October 2000.    

Following the chain of Octobers past, we see how Amy’s transgendered teen both is, and isn’t, the person he was as a child. How the love Amy feels for her second husband is but a dim reflection of the passion she knew with Greg, who fell—or jumped—to his death in 2015. How Amy’s best friend, Dee, who grew up Black in the same white-bread, Appalachian foothills that Amy did, has a very different story to tell about the two women’s friendship—and about the country unraveling around them.

Most lives carry an inflection point: a Big Bang moment separating before from after. The farther we drift from that seismic event, the harder it is to imagine an alternative. But what Amy comes to understand is that fate is a story we tell ourselves to cover for the mistakes of the past. And that love is a force beyond all reason—a special relativity that binds and shapes. 

White Rabbit

("Rabbit 2" by Rudolph Kusow)

Remember the awe

you felt

after the magic act?

What if the magician

reached so deep

inside his magic hat

that Abracadabra

he pulled himself in?

Is death any less 

mysterious

or galling?

I felt bad for the bunny,

even as a kid.

Offered up as an answer

it can't comprehend

Shocked every night

by the light

and applause

What terror there is

in innocence. 

Can The Circle Be Unbroken?

 

Dad died on Christmas Day. 

I held his hand in the nursing home room

and together, we listened to

the Carter Family play.

Then I told him to let go.

And he did. 

It was the most precious thing.

Dad dying 

on Christmas Day. 

Nowheres

(Detail from "Sunrise with Sea Monsters" by J.M.W. Turner)

I lean in to kiss him goodbye 
but I can’t kiss away
the smoke in his eyes 

“You’ve been a good dad,”

I whisper in his ear

both of us now 

on the verge of tears

his confusion 

turning me clear

this demon dementia

unloosing our tension

father

daughter 

the expectation

of sorrow 

all of it crumbling

on a bridge

to nowheres 

Of Faith

From the dark side
of the sunlit glass,
I watch a squirrel,
without fear, leap
from one trunk
to another tree's limb

Does her stomach drop
as the slim arm bends
down in surprise
and back up again?

Or is she merely an arrow
—the spoke of one thought—
indifferent to autumn's
vainglorious shouts

fixed on the task
of a half-complete nest
where the work of her body
must purse like a comma,
pausing—
and pregnant —
with what comes  — 

after the tree 
has jettisoned its leaves
and the snow falls silent 
and godless
and cold 

Deleted (WW)

("Moby Dick" by Ilya Nimo)

Pulled for submission. 

Sword People

("Red Wood Cutting" by Vladimir Cush)

“Hey! What the fuck? There’s a sword in my chest!” 

This is how it begins.

You can’t believe it. You see the sword, you feel the sword, but the sword doesn’t register. The initial shock waves carry you through the first days, and then weeks. It hurts having a sword stuck in your chest, and what’s worse, it hurts to see other people—good people—in the same boat as you.

You recognize each other, from a distance. That is one consolation. These are your people now. All of you resolve, with frantic phone calls and nightly incantations, to never forgive the people who stuck the swords through your ribs, caressing your vital organs with their teeth. Because fuck that. Why would you? They knew what they were doing. Most of the sword stabbers admit quite happily to the desire to do it again. It seems they’ve grown an appetite for it. Babies wish they'd sleep so well.   

It’s exhausting waking up every day with a sword sticking out of your chest. It’s also—can we just say it?—a little boring. There are other things you’d rather be thinking about than navigating the world in this awkward, painful fashion. 

For the first year, you expect the sword to be removed, possibly by a hero-in-training or a magic spell conjured by a passing crone. But you’ve tried everything you can think of, and the thing won’t budge. It’s as if the sword was a sword, and your chest were a stone. And if that’s a crappy analogy, it’s because analogies are harder to come by now. Creativity? Yes. Also a stone. 

You’d like very much to forget your sword. But the damn thing keeps getting in the way. Even seemingly trivial tasks—like eating in a restaurant, or talking to your neighbor, whose chest is mercifully free of sharp sabers—takes special effort, provoking spasms of anxiety and second-guessing. 

You don’t want to hate your neighbor—who once lent you his grass trimmer, and who has two terriers he dresses in funny sweaters when the weather turns cold—but you’re troubled by his unblemished chest cavity, and the way his smooth, flannel shirt buttons all the way up his neck. More than that, you hate the way his eyes flash down to your sword whenever he’s speaking to you. You think you read contempt in his eyes, though it could also be allergies. Your judgment feels skewed. Is gravity off somehow? There is some added weight.

Oh, right. The sword. 

Sometimes, you’d like to butt him with it. Whack him good and hard, ass down to dirt. But you don’t. You won’t. You mustn’t. Because manners, for one. 

Also you’re better than them. 

It’s not like you to be angry or vengeful. You don’t enjoy anger, were never one of those half-cocked people who sucked on its fumes like astro fuel. Nor are you a saint. If it were up to you (and it’s not), you’d rather leave the disillusionment and uphill battles to others: the broken-hearted, the organizers, the artists and gardeners.  

Still, you have a sword sticking out of your chest and somebody—lots of somebodies—helped put it there. After the first year, you begin to examine their intentions more coolly, recognizing their contributions to their communities and families, how their soft metal reason had been hammered into armor by slick-tongued carnival barkers and money whisperers, probably to protect some monstrous sadness within (you hope). You begin to entertain the notion that forgiveness is conceivable, because if nothing else, you’re alive and you have the power to forgive. You imagine yourself lighter, angelic, free of all earthly entanglements. Jesus. You imagine Jesus. 

The truth is: that sword would be there, with or without your neighbor. Your boss. Your mother and father.  

Sixty-three million people helped wedge it in there, nice and tight, with a shrug or a grunt, eyes open or shut, depending on the deed’s distaste to them. Individually, each sinner’s sin tips the balance but slight. Perhaps it’s you who’s stuck, in some holier-than-thou state martyrs like to mix up for themselves. Life is short. Just ask the corpses with swords sticking out of their chests you have to step over on the way home from work. You might be the hero-in-training your neighbor, your boss, your parents require. You’re not just your flesh. You’re also the love you shine in the wo—

“Damn it!”

You wake up in the wrong position, and the sword has perforated an artery. Did somebody come into your room last night and sit down on your chest? Was that imagined? It seems unlikely. Have you been dreaming? 

Why is reality so—squiggly—of late? Do you need glasses? Is the car engine running? Who let the dog out? Oh, right. It was you. 

Oh, right. You don’t have a dog. 

A very real thing is the blood soaking up your sheets. Darn it. You stuff more gauze inside the hole in your chest, change your sheets, flip the mattress, but the pain persists, dull and affable. It’s a different flavor of pain, two years in, than it was at the outset. It has contours and confidence and throws its roots out like ticklers. But you are benumbed, detachment your drug of cowardice.   

Lately, when running across another sword person, both of you avoid looking at each other’s chests, are careful to position yourself in a way that reduces the incidence of any “ramming” or “clanging.” The sheer persistence of your maladies is embarrassing to you both. Even swords bespeak a powerlessness. And what’s the point in rehashing it all? Blindness is a kind of peace. 

Now, though . . . 

Is there a prescription outside of submission or pain? Leaning, hilt first, into the wall, you deliberate for many months, sliding in and out of consciousness, winter passing into spring, while sunlight spreads a sticky warmth across your eyeballs, like a tarnish marching over wedding silver. 

There is a sword sticking out of your chest. You think it will never quite finish the job. But right now, with your eyes closed, you can feel your heart protest its tip with each beat.  

It isn’t right. 

It’s still not right. 

You fill your lungs and breathe, pausing at maximum intake, before letting it out with a shudder. 

Nope.

Your eyes open. 

You still hate those motherfuckers.

And that you can’t forgive. 

Kissing the Dirt

God help me, I’ve lost my faith in the world. 

Which isn’t the same as losing my love or my fight for it. Rather, I know where I am: on my knees, lips touching dirt, while something very large and distracted is pressing its boot to my neck. 

Why be instilled with a sense of justice, if justice means nothing. Everywhere I look, terrible people are getting away with terrible things, while their cheering sections jeer and crow, celebrating a superficial and cancerous certainty, replacing problems with wins. 

Meanwhile, spring has come, and nature is putting her hope in pretty things. Have you seen the daffodils? Do they still impress, when the sunshine fills them like torches and their brightness lights your way home from work?    

I want to join you there. I want so badly to believe it’s all that’s needed. I miss so much my reveries and dreams.

But I still remember a spring three or four years ago, when our dog discovered a nest of baby bunnies in our backyard and proceeded to swallow them, one by one, before I could do anything to stop it, the tiny creatures screaming from their pink and tender lungs, and me screaming from mine, long after the deed was done.   

You just ate 

You weren't even hungry

He wasn’t sorry, but for months afterward, I felt differently toward him, however unfair the charge against instinct and nature, which manages to be both pretty and terrible, without any evidence of internal contradiction. Then time stepped in and covered things up, as time does, and I gradually returned to finding him adorable.

He still goes out there at this time of year to eagerly sniff and paw at the ground. And I love the beast, in spite of his beastliness. I love this world, not like a child anymore—but like a parent does. Guardedly. Sadly. With loss always threatening, and making the heart sore.   

I have no control when it comes to politics, or the truth’s distortion, or the monstrous pretenders who have their hands on the ropes. 

All I can do is look for the baby bunnies each spring before letting the dog out, and fill my bird feeder with birdseed, and turn off Twitter when I’m choked with sadness or anger, and love my children—who just this year have grown taller than I—and keep putting pen to paper, to try and defend the charge of beauty for one more day and tender hour.

New

(Photo credit here)

"It's too cold," she says. "I can't bear the thought of those sheets on my skin."

"Or these hands," he says.

"Or those hands."

"A simple kiss, then?" 

"Your kisses are never that simple."

He sniffs. "Somebody's awfully full of herself, wearing seven layers of clothes, a bunchy robe and some indeterminate number of socks."

"I thought all that just made me more mysterious."

He thinks for a moment. "Depends. Is that an invitation?"

"No."

"Ah. Then no, not mysterious. Just bunchy."

"Come on. Let's lie down, side by side in the dark, with our warm, lovely layers on. We can wait for the new year just like this, before going to bed like proper middle-aged people."

He turns off the bed stand light. Her breath catches. Glow-in-the-dark stars appear on their bedroom ceiling, coursing with a gentle light. 

"When did you—?" she asks, turning on her side to face him.

"Today."

"Right before lunch?"

"Just after."

"Huh. Well. I like this quite a bit."

"I thought you might."

"I like it so well I may have to kiss you."

"And what if I don't want your kiss? What if I just want to lie here, wait for the old year to die, and then go to sleep like the boring middle-aged person I am?"

"Oh, don't worry. You don't."

"I don't?"

"No. In fact, this was your plan all along."

"In fact," he says, turning to face her. "It was."

She leans in to kiss him. He is warm and lovely and deeply good. She wriggles the toes inside her two pairs of socks and slings a leg across his.

"You make me happy," she says into his ear, before catching his mouth with her own.

A star drops from the ceiling and lands atop her cheek. She brushes it away—hopes for more.


----

This is the first piece of flash fiction I've written in quite awhile, and continues my "New" series, begun back in 2008.

Happy New Year to all of you. Let's all endeavor to stay warm, and open. 

Wonder Lust

I miss the pause
for mystery

the beguiling crook
of the crone's
withered finger

how a crevice advancing
through a toppled log
can fit the whole
of a kingdom, comfortably

   moss overtop
       to muffle
          the secrets

I miss the wondering wave
of not knowing
collapsing upon
some silver-sighted shore

where the questions sprawl
across rocks
like sirens
calling, calling, calling

for more

Blog Anniversary: 10 Years Later

Ten years ago,
I slipped inside
a backyard rocket
and launched myself
to the moon

Strange thing is—
I live here now.

Not quite as bouncy
as I was back then

Not nearly as beholden
to the eyes of men

And yet—

You should see the Earth
from my perspective

Blue and beautiful

   if full of Martians

and thick with treasure
I long to explore

One Year Ago

How to mark a year like this?

Has it, in fact, been a year? Time seems as slippery as everything else.

A year ago, I woke up to the knowledge that we were about to elect Hillary Clinton president of the United States. I was happy for the historical significance of the milestone, though I was not as excited as I was in 2008, when Barack Obama ascended to that office. The campaign had been too ugly, the divide in the country too troubling, and for as much as I hated Donald Trump, I did not love Hillary. I did, however, believe she'd make a good president, though I doubted she'd be given the chance to succeed by the opposition party in power. Still, when placed next to her competitor, I didn't see how a rational person wouldn't prefer her by a hundred million squintillion to one.

But anyway, that morning I was high on anticipation, filled with the sweet, near-relief of it all being done. In 24 hours, I would never have to think about that man ever again: or not as an existential threat, at any rate. Early in the morning, I went out to fill the bird feeder at the top of our hill which faces a steep, wooded ravine behind our backyard. As I approached the feeder, I stopped short.

There was a stag standing beyond the chainlink fence.

He looked at me. I returned the gaze. In the space between breaths, I counted ten or twelve points on his rack. He was imperious. Imposing. Magnificently wild. I'd never seen a buck so near before. They're notorious loners: people-shy.

In the film of my memory, he snorts and stamps his hoof a little. In reality, I think he simply walked on, crunching the fall leaves as he went.

A little thrilled, I chose to see this encounter as a sign. I'd never seen a stag so close! Our country had never elected a female President! It was meant to be, wasn't it.

That night, as it began to dawn on us that the impossible was fast becoming the nightmarishly probable, I fell off a cliff, like so many of us did.

Today, I'm still down here, struggling. Horrified. Disgusted. Mourning what we've lost and almost despairing of what's to come.

I still don't feel like I understand what happened. Nor do I know how we reclaim our footing and place in the world.*

I know this, though: I've stopped believing in signs.


------

*I wrote this before the Tuesday elections, and the subsequent wave of Democratic victories in Virginia, New Jersey, Maine and elsewhere. Citizens came out in high numbers for an off-year election and rejected Trumpism full-throatedly. A startlingly high percentage of the new Virginia officeholders are women—including the first transgender person ever elected to a state legislature—spurred to action by their love of country and hatred for what Trump and the Trump-enabling GOP have wrought. 

I am buoyed by these results. I am heartened. They are a chink in the side of that cliff. Now let's all grab hold and climb. 

January 20, 2017

Ever since then,
it goes like this.

We eat. We sleep.
Sometimes we dream
before getting up
and losing the thread.

We walk the same steps
to the bathroom,
the sink.
We sit down
We rise.
The floorboards creak.

We reach for our phones,
inevitably.

Click—
and free fall down holes without any roots.
Ghost walk through mirrors which enlarge and distort.
On rooftops patroled by wolves in wolf clothing,
we sit on adrenaline and wait. some. more.

Click.

Why this grief we've invited
that's just within reach?

Trump. Puerto Rico. Mass shooters and "balance."
Nuclear war. The first amendment. Environmental armageddon.

Ire comes early. Shock, then despair.
Because—none of it's as shocking as it was last year.

We put the stone in our pocket,
get ourselves off to work.

Back home, tucked in bed, we dread
what's in store for our children's kids.
Wonder at the blitheness
with which we gifted them life.
Would we change it?
No. But it's a thought.

And yet
the most of us—
we do keep our heads.
We've adjusted—roughly—to
the nightmare we live,
ears barely ringing from the blanket alarms,
eyes blindly scanning for the next savior
or devil.

Denial—oh yeah. But only in spurts.

Hope?

Oh, Obama. Hope is changed.

For fear's made us children
in our abuser's house
and hope is most dangerous
when the tyrant is scared.

And yet, what I want
on this crisp, Sunday morning
that seems, by all appearance, so ordinary
is for someone to cover
my screen with their hands
and to say:

"I don't know, either,
baby bird, little lamb.

But it's autumn outside.
Look.
All the things—they're changing again.

Point your finger out there,
to the ones you can touch.

Take the roof off the sky—
see how high we can jump."

Deleted

Green heron

I'm not as sold
on you
as I am
on your cousin

You have little
in the way
of her arabesque
angles

and know nothing
of the slow, melodious way
she takes umbrage,
packing up the long legs,
concert hall wings
crook neck 

into an island
she heaves out
and then skyward

raising the calm
of her own private ocean

feet far behind
like a lover's old token

until dropping anchor,
en pointe and alone.


Lucky,
you don't seem to mind
the comparison,
too busy listening
to the indiscreet
secrets
of minnows

feet tucked in slime
eyes grim and primordial

on the shoal of a river

the blue guy
let slide.

41

I cried to find there was poetry left. 

"Come home," she said. 

I did. 

Disease

I can’t remember how to 

  write

the fear and the dread 
are
swamps

not founts

the words 
I cupped
been bulldozed to

 dust

and I feel dead inside 
dead inside 
dead and-

 lost

  
I cannot - 

 right.

The Best 100 Novels Challenge

The Champ!

Nathan Bransford posted a list of his 100 favorite novels and extended an invitation for other bloggers to do the same. Intrigued by the idea (and eager to waste some time), I decided to take him up on the challenge. 

It was a fun, if exasperating, exercise. What I found most difficult was evaluating books I hadn't read in ages, but remembered having strong feelings about. It's difficult to rank the things you love, anyway, but how to rank books you last read in high school against the ones you read last year? I'm a different person now. The older books' nuances (and sometimes, entire plots) might have escaped me in the intervening years. In the end, though, I figured if the book was powerful enough to have left an emotional fingerprint, then it deserved to make the cut (though it likely ended up in the bottom part of this list). 

I did not include collections of unrelated short stories, shorter novellas or memoirs. 

So, without further ado, here's my list of the top 100 novels: 

1. Jane Eyre
2. Anna Karenina
3. A Room with a View
4. Persuasion
5. Women In Love
6. Gilead
7. The English Patient
8. The Razor's Edge
9. Emily of New Moon
10. On Chesil Beach
11. A Passage to India
12. Charlotte's Web
13. Bel Canto
14. Madame Bovary
15. Olive Kitteridge 
16. Pride and Prejudice
17. The Age of Innocence
18. Anne of Green Gables
19. The Corrections
20. Breathing Lessons
21. Silk
22. Home
23. Crime and Punishment
24. The Anthologist
25. Middlesex
26. The Book of Ruth
27. The Burgess Boys
28. The Remains of the Day
29. Middlemarch
30. Villette
31. The BFG
32. The God of Small Things
33. Freedom
34. Lila
35. My Ántonia
36. The Sorrows of Young Werther
37. A Thousand Splendid Suns
38. Mrs. Dalloway
39. Atonement
40. The Road
41. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
42. Jude the Obscure
43. Les Misérables
44. The Lowland
45. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
46. Sense and Sensibility
47. The Portrait of a Lady
48. Great Expectations
49. Mudbound
50. The Grapes of Wrath
51. Winesburg, Ohio
52. Of Love and Other Demons
53. The Art of Fielding
54. The Sense of an Ending
55. The House of Mirth
56. Little Women
57. To Kill a Mockingbird
58. Mrs. Dalloway
59. Life After Life
60. One Hundred Years of Solitude
61. Siddhartha
62. The Namesake
63. An Artist of the Floating World
64. A Map of the World
65. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
66. The Ten-Year Nap
67. And the Mountains Echoed
68. Elegies for the Brokenhearted
69. Little Children
70. And Then There Were None
71. Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret
72. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
73. Emma
74. Digging to America
75. The Vagabond
76. To the Lighthouse
77. Animal Farm
78. White Teeth
79. Amy and Isabelle
80. A Farewell to Arms
81. Things Fall Apart
82. The Scarlet Letter
83. The Song is You
84. Elective Affinities
85. Talking It Over
86. The Great Gatsby
87. The Red and the Black
88. The Westing Game
89. Station Eleven
90. Howard's End
91. Life of Pi
92. The Wings of the Dove
93. Lady Chatterley's Lover
94. Wonder Boys
95. Tess of the d'Urbervilles
96. My Name is Lucy Barton
97. Searching for Caleb
98. Norwegian Wood
99. All Quiet on the Western Front
100. Brooklyn

So there you go! No doubt I've forgotten a few. And I clearly have some big holes here. No James Joyce, no Marcel Proust, no Toni Morrison, Herman Melville, or Vladimir Nabokov—not because I haven't read their work, but because I haven't read any one book to completion. I hope to remedy that someday. I'm also not that adventurous when it comes to genre fiction, and I know I'm missing out on some wonderful mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, etc. 

If we were keeping tabs on frequency of mentions, Anne Tyler, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Strout, E.M. Forster and Marilynne Robinson would take the prize. 

One final note: Jane Eyre may or may not be the best novel of all time, but I've come to believe that the novels we read at a formative age (I was 13) are the ones that stick to our souls and won't let go. I've read that book a couple times since in the intervening years, and it's always held up. I love Jane. I love Mr. Rochester. I even love poor Bertha, raving away in that attic of hers.   

They're why I fell in love with literature. And they're at least partly responsible for why I write today.

Thanks for the fun challenge, Nathan! I hope others take it up. If you do, be sure to share your list in the comments section of Nathan's original post, and he'll link his post to your blog.